After the LB7, here's another model from the beginning of man's journey into space: the capsule used by the soviets to place the first man in history (Yuri Gagarin) in orbit on April 12, 1961.

This model needed many long hours of work, principally with all the cables around the instrument module. It is interesting to compare the conceptual differences between Russian and American capsule design: the differences are really awesome!

The nmtools are a set of sophisticated command-line utilities enabling anyone to produce high-resolution normalmaps for use with Celestia.

The tools are available here - for Linux, OSX and Windows, together with a detailed tutorial. Also available is a forum where you may post your comments.The Earth with a normalmap produced with the nmtools:

March 09: James R. Basset, a very talented modeler has just released 2 new fine models of the Mercury missions. My 2005 model must now be considered obsolete, I keep it available for lower config, but if you really like accurate models, it's this way...

This is a high resolution Celestia Add-On featuring NASA's second manned Mercury Mission, piloted by Virgil I. 'Gus' Grissom on July 21, 1962.